Sexual Assault: Denying Your Anger at the Perpetrator

By: Beth McHugh 2008

One would expect that when a person has been sexually assaulted, the
victim of the crime would be extremely angry at the perpetrator. But
the act of sexual assault has such a profound effect on a person that
what one might expect should happen, doesn’t necessarily happen
that way at all.

Take the case of Madi. Madi had been sexually assaulted by her boss
of seven years. She didn’t report the incident and continued to
work with him. However, within weeks of the assault she developed severe
anxiety and panic attacks. It was these out-of-control feelings that
drove her into therapy, not the fact that she had been assaulted.

In fact, she was at a loss to work out the cause of her anxiety and
panic. She even took a day off work to sit down quietly and try to write
down all the things that were bothering her that could be driving the
anxiety. One of them was the assault.

So this is what we worked on. Yet in describing her assaulter, Madi
consistently told me what a wonderful man he was. I asked her was she
angry at him for what he had done. The answer was a smiling “no”.
In fact, whenever she spoke of this man and what he had done to her,
she smiled. Smiling during descriptions of traumatic incidences is an
obvious clue that things are more than a little askew in the lives of
the traumatized.

She also minimized the level of pain the assault had caused her and
she had the classic guilt of the traumatized victim of sexual assault.
Once we got her to dispel her false beliefs about her own guilt and
any consensual role she played in the attack, out came the anger.

This is when I know we are making progress in therapy. Anger is power
and progress can then be made towards an acceptance of the assault and
ultimately, recovery. Where there is denial, no recovery is possible.

Denial can range from Madi believing her boss was “a lovely man”
despite evidence to the contrary, to accepting childhood rape as a form
of “love” on the part of the father.